Can agricultural growth be sustained? More specifically, have the efforts of the last several decades to put in place a global agricultural research system established the research capacity that will enable the farmers of the developing world to meet future demands?
This report, which summarizes and interprets the research policy recommendations made by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) Third System Review Panel, attempts to respond to these questions. [1]
Mahendra M. Shah served as executive secretary of the review panel, with Maurice F. Strong as chair. The panel addressed issues that the system of international agricultural research centers, organized under CGIAR, will face as it attempts to respond to the food security, resource management, and poverty reduction challenges of the first several decades of the 21st century.
The report also attempts to fill a broader public information function by highlighting the unique role and accomplishments of the CGIAR system. It addresses the resources that will need mobilization if the international systems, together with the National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) in the developing world, are to meet the challenges. The report is well written. The figures, tables, and boxes accompanying the text are particularly useful.

Inventing the CGIAR System

CGIAR's vision of a global agricultural research system emerged in the early 1960s as a result of growing concern about a potential world food crisis generated by rapid population growth. Freedom from want had been part of the vision of the architects of new post-World War II international institutions. In the immediate post-war years, much of the institutional responsibility for meeting world food needs fell on the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). But John Boyd Orr, the first director general of FAO, burdened by the memory of the agricultural surpluses of the 1930s, was highly critical of the view that knowledge and technology represented a serious constraint on agricultural production capacity. In the first two decades after World War II, assistance for agriculture was conducted largely in a technology transfer and community development mode.[2]
The inadequacy of these policies led to a reexamination of assumptions about the availability of a body of agricultural technology that could be readily exported from countries that had achieved high levels of agricultural productivity to low productivity countries and regions. The result was the emergence of a new perspective: Agricultural technology, particularly yield- -enhancing biological technology, is highly location specific. Evidence also accumulated to the effect that only limited productivity gains could be achieved by the reallocation-- or the more effective use-of the resources available to peasant producers in poor countries.
A new view also emerged on the role of peasant producers in agricultural development. In early post-war development literature, peasant producers were viewed as obstacles, "bound by custom and tradition, " to agricultural development. In an iconoclastic work published in 1964, Theodore W. Schultz, who subsequently received a Nobel Prize for his work on agricultural development, advanced a "poor but efficient" view of peasant producers. [3] He viewed them as making efficient use of the resources at hand but living in societies in which productivity enhancing high-payoff inputs had not been made available to them. Schultz insisted that the principal source of growth in agricultural production in modern agriculture was reproducible resources. Although the services of nature, particularly land and water, would be essential for sustaining agricultural production, the sources of growth would be based on new knowledge and new technology.
These insights, gained from experience and analysis, shaped the response of the international community to the food crises of the 1960s and the 1970s. In 1969, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the World Bank, FAO, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and a number of economic assistance agencies in developing countries held consultations that led to the creation of CGIAR. The four international agricultural research centers already established by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations--the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, the International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat (CIMMYT) in Mexico, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia, and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Nigeria--were brought into CGIAR as the first research units in the new system. [4]
During the next two decades, new centers were established to conduct research on additional commodities (potatoes, cassava, bananas, plantain, livestock, and livestock disease); resources (soils, water, forest, marine, and genetic); and on agricultural, food, and research policies (see Figure 1 on this page). The establishment of the newer centers reflected a shift from an almost exclusive focus on the enhancement of crop and animal productivity to a broader research program that included the resource and environmental bases on which agricultural production rests. By the late 1990s, approximately 30 percent of the research budget of CGIAR centers was directed to areas of environmental protection and biodiversity preservation.

Impact Assessment

There is now a large body of research indicating exceptionally high social rates of return to agricultural research in developing countries. [5] The studies suggest average rates of return upward of 40 percent for a wide range of commodities. The report by Shah and Strong makes brief references to the specific impacts of CGIAR research (p. 27-32). Because of the close articulation between research at CGIAR centers and NARS, it is not easy to isolate their separate contributions.
There can be no question, however, about the importance of the contributions of CGIAR research to the growth of production of the most important food commodities in developing countries. For example, a study conducted in the early 1990s indicated that wheat varieties developed through the CIMMYT-NARS collaborative research network accounted for more than 40 percent of the 13,000 wheat varieties released in developing countries between 1966 and 1990. In addition, varieties developed by using CIMMYT-NARS germplasm as parents in NARS adaptive research accounted for about 25 percent of all varieties released in developing countries. Thus, about two-thirds of all wheat varieties in developing counties from 1966 to 1990 were directly or indirectly based on germplasm developed by the CIMMYT-NARS network. In addition, varieties containing CYMMT-based genetic material had a significant yield advantage relative to varieties containing only locally based genetic material. [6] Studies of other major commodities, such as rice, maize, and potatoes, indicate comparable results.
The contribution of CGIAR to strengthening national agricultural research systems in developing countries has received much less attention than the direct impact of center research on production. CGIAR centers serve as nodes for a global system for the exchange of scientific and technical information and genetic material. There is a continuous exchange of scientific, technical, and administrative staff among the several institutes and between the CGIAR system and agricultural research systems in both developed and developing countries. The world's largest collection of genetic resources for the major crop plants are now located at CGLAR centers. The mission of the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute is to strengthen international collaboration in the conservation and use of plant genetic resources and to disseminate knowledge and technologies relevant to improved conservation and use of plant genetic resources.
A continuing concern that has never been fully resolved is the relationship between increased agricultural production and the broader problems of rural poverty. A benefit that has frequently been overlooked is the impact of CGIAR-NARS research on the urban poor. In developing countries, the very poor frequently spend more than half of any incremental income on basic food commodities. Without the increase in the production of basic food commodities resulting from CGIAR research, basic food prices in many of the poorest countries would be substantially higher. [7] However, agricultural research has been a blunt instrument with which to address the problems of resource-poor families in rural areas.
The member institutes and centers of the CGIAR system also deserve a number of criticisms. They have often been tempted to announce premature "breakthroughs of the year." An example was the premature announcement by JIRI in 1993 of a new rice biotype that would result in dramatically higher yields.
Numerous other examples could be cited. The temptation for premature publicity about potential breakthroughs is often driven by national donor agency pressures to demonstrate to their constituencies the importance of their support for the CGIAR research effort. A second, valid criticism is that institute directors and scientists have, at times, acted as if they were competitors rather than collaborators with NARS, thereby giving inadequate recognition to the work of national scientists.

A New Mission

What about the future? Will the CGIAR system be as effective in meeting the challenge of the next several decades as it has been in the past? What are those challenges? Gordon Conway, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, has called for a "doubly green revolution" that will contribute effectively to poverty reduction by enhancing food production. [8] The environmental community has called repeatedly for a stronger ecological approach in the CGIAR research agenda.
The intensification of agricultural production associated with the adoption of larger yielding crop varieties has generated a number of environmental concerns. Some of these concerns are related to the expansion of irrigated areas on which many of the higher yielding crops grow. Irrigation systems are often poorly designed, managed, and maintained. Overexploitation of groundwater in such areas as northwestern India and north China results in falling groundwater levels. Expansion of gravity irrigation systems in areas, such as the Indus River basin in south-central Asia, results in salinization. Intensive use of fertilizer and pesticides have resulted in soil degradation and water pollution. There have also been negative impacts on fish culture, livestock, and human health in some areas.
These problems are receiving increasing attention at the CGIAR centers. Recognition of problems associated with intensification of crop production has resulted in a substantial broadening of the research agenda at CGIAR centers. By the late 1990s, research directly related to productivity enhancement had fallen to less than 40 percent of center budgets.[9]
The review panel recommended a new mission statement, which CGIAR has adopted, "to contribute to food security and poverty eradication in developing countries through research, partnership, capacity building, and policy support promoting sustainable agricultural development based on environmentally sound management of natural resources" (p. 330). It insisted that the specific commodity approach taken by many of CGIAR centers would not be sufficient to meet the demands of population and income growth and to protect and enhance the agricultural resource base. The panel proposed "a far more holistic approach to the interlinked problems, with sustainable agriculture providing the common thread (p. 33).
In its deliberations, the panel found it necessary to struggle with a number of difficult issues. One of the most fundamental was the resource constraints under which the system has been forced to work. Since the early 1990s, when several new natural resource-oriented institutes were added to the system, CGIAR experienced increasing financial stress (see Figure 1). Financial support declined continuously throughout most of the 1990s. Since the end of the Cold War, contributions by the United States have fallen from a commitment of 25 percent of CGIAR's budget to less than 15 percent. The decline in U.S. support has made it easier for other developed countries to reduce their support. In Germany, a green movement, critical of modern biological and chemical technology in agriculture, made it easy for a government burdened with the heavy resource demands associated with reunification to reduce its commitment to the support of international agricultural research. Among the developed countries, only Japan, Denmark, and a few others increased their support for CGIAR during the 1990s. Without enhanced support from the World Bank, CGIAR's financial crisis would have been even deeper.
A second issue that the panel struggled with was the role that biotechnology should play in center research programs. The green revolution technology, based on the application of the older Mendelian genetics, had not escaped controversy. Some critics labeled it a western technology inappropriately imposed on nonwestern societies. It was criticized for contributing to loss of genetic diversity and for a bias against the poor. [10] The panel attempted to tread cautiously among embracing the potential of the new biotechnology to release biological constraints on crop and animal productivity, concern about possible health and environmental impacts, and the inadequate regulatory regimes to monitor release of new biotechnology products for commercial use. That these deliberations were under way during an escalating "food fight" between the United States and several European Community member countries contributed to the caution with which the review panel approached the issue of biotechnology." [11]
A third, closely related issue that confronted the panel was the issue of intellectual property rights of the technology developed at CGIAR centers. The urgency of intellectual property rights arises from the much larger role that private sector research and development is playing in the development of new agricultural biotechnologies than in older Mendelian based biological technology, particularly in developed countries and in some of the larger and more advanced developing countries. One of the concerns addressed by the critics is farmer access and ability to pay. "Those who oppose protection argue that the protection shifts control of resources from farmers and local communities to large corporations. It also tends to skew the research agenda to favor industrial agriculture, bypassing the community and diversity-based agriculture that, over the generations, has fostered and maintained genetic diversity" (p. 46).
A related concern is the excessively broad intellectual property rights granted by the U.S. national patent office on genetic material. [12] The panel had to confront the issue that failure to establish intellectual property rights on the product of its research could mean that it would lose control of its own research results. It will not be able to give away what it does not own. The panel "urged CGIAR to create a legal entity to hold and manage the international patent rights on behalf of the centers" (p. 47). The use of the new technology would be allowed under a licensing arrangement that would ensure that technology developed by CGIAR centers would be freely available. Several European donors to the system opposed this recommendation. The governing body of the CGIAR system has not yet acted on the recommendation, in spite of its urgency.
Another issue, which the review panel failed to confront, is the governance and structure of the CGIAR system. It is generally acknowledged, even by its strongest supporters, that the system has great difficulty arriving at and implementing strategic decisions. The independent corporate identity of the constituent institutes has the great strength that research priority decisions can be made at the level at which the science is actually done, and by those with the imagination and capacity to know what is feasible. This independence has been eroded as the core budgets of the centers have declined relative to external project funding by donors. As the system has grown, the Technical Advisory Committee has found it increasingly difficult to advise the governing body on scientific and organizational issues. CGIAR has found it difficult to reallocate resources from an unproductive to a more productive research objective and almost impossible to reorganize or close the several centers that have been unproductive or whose missions are no longer relevant. If the CGIAR system is to meet the challenges outlined in the third system review or in the report by Shah and Strong, it will need to address the issue of its own governance and advisory structure with greater determination than it has demonstrated in the past.

A Second Green Revolution?

The developed country donors to the CGIAR system have become too complacent about its capacity to meet the demands placed on the world's farmers to meet the food demands arising out of population and income growth and to navigate the transition to a sustainable system of agricultural production over the next half century. [13]
The accomplishments of the past half-century are impressive. World population rose from 2.5 billion in1950 to 6.0 billion in 2000. In spite of rapid population growth, global average per-capita food availability rose from less than 2,400 calories to more than 2,700. Food grains have become available on increasingly favorable terms to consumers in developed and developing countries. Population growth will likely add in the neighborhood of 3.0 billion people to world population by 2050. Income growth in poor countries will also add substantially to food demand. [14]
In the early 1960s, it was not difficult to anticipate the sources of the increase in agricultural production during the next several decades. Advances in crop production would come from expansion in irrigated areas, from more intensive application of fertilizer and crop protection chemicals, and from the development of crop varieties more responsive to fertilizer and management. Advances in animal production would come from genetic improvements and advances in animal nutrition and animal health. At a more fundamental level, increases in grain yields would occur from changes in plant architecture that make possible higher plant populations per hectare and by increasing the ratio of grain to total dry matter.
Increases in production of animals and animal products would come about by decreasing the proportion of feed devoted to animal maintenance and by increasing the proportion used to produce useable animal products.
Today, it is much more difficult to tell a convincing story about the sources of increase in crop and animal production over the next half century. [15] Neither expansion of cultivated areas nor increases in irrigated areas will contribute substantially to agricultural production in the future. There are severe physiological constraints to increasing the grain-to-dry-matter ratio or to reducing the percentage of animal feed devoted to animal maintenance. Constraints are already evident in terms of a reduction in the incremental yield increase from fertilizer application. There are also preliminary indications of a decline in agricultural research productivity--measured in terms of the number of scientist research years to achieve incremental gains in crop and animal productivity.
It is possible, within another decade, that advances in molecular biology and genetic engineering will reverse the urgency of the above concerns. However, the products of genetic engineering now on the market, primarily plant protection and animal health products, are not contributing to raising yield ceilings above the levels achieved with the older Mendelian technologies. The institutional constraints associated with the development of intellectual property rights and the regulatory regimes for monitoring health and environmental impacts add further uncertainty. The economic incentives that induce private sector research are directing efforts toward higher value-added products, which include functional foods, neutraceuticals, and pharmaceuticals, instead of yield enhancement.
If the CGIAR system had not already been invented, it would be necessary to do so. The challenge of the future will be to make it a truly global system, to reform its governance and management, and to provide the substantial new resources necessary if the world's farmers are to meet the demands that their societies will place on them. International assistance agencies and national governments need to direct renewed attention to reversing the recent decline in donor support for agricultural development and to strengthening the national agricultural research systems in the poor countries of the world.
There are other issues that will be impossible to resolve within the CGIAR system of agricultural research centers. Agricultural productivity growth will remain a blunt instrument in attempts to resolve the deeper problems of urban and rural poverty. The centers, in cooperation with national agricultural research programs, can be expected to play a modest role in addressing the environmental issues directly associated with agricultural production and nitrous oxide and methane emissions, for example. But the broader issues of poverty reduction and environmental protection must be addressed by policies and programs designed to specifically confront these issues. A major tragedy is that the international community has not yet put in place an environmental research system designed to provide the knowledge and technology needed to address environmental issues at the enterprise and community levels in developing countries.

Vernon W. Ruttan is Regents Professor emeritus in the Department of Applied Economies and the Department of Economics at the University of Minnesota. He concentrates on agricultural economics and development economics.
He is the author, with Yojiro Hayomi, of Agricultural Development: An International Perspective (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) and of Technology, Growth, and Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Ruttan is indebted to Dana Dalrymple and Per Pinstrup-Andersen for comments on an earlier draft.

NOTES

(1.) M. Shah and M. Strong, Food in the 21st Century: From Science to Sustainable Agriculture (Washington, D.C., The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank, 2000).

Earlier reviews of the CGIAR system were conducted in the mid-1970s and in the mid-1980s. For an appraisal of the earlier CGIAR reviews and of the CGIAR review process, see K. Fuglie and V. W. Ruttan, "Value of External Reviews of Research at the International Agricultural Research Centers," Agricultural Economics 3 (1989): 365-80.

(2.) Y. Hayami and V. W. Ruttan, Agricultural Development: An International Perspective (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 56-9, 256-60. 403-405.

(3.) T. W. Schultz, Transforming Traditional Agriculture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, t964). Schultz was a recipient of a 1979 Nobel Price in economics.

(4.) For a more complete history of the CGIAR system, see W. Baum, Partners Against Hunger: The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1986).

(5.) See, for example, J. Anderson and D. Dalrymple, the World Bank, The Grant Program and the CGIAR: A Retrospective Review (Washington, D.C.: World Bank QED, Working Paper Series No. 1, March 1999); R. Evenson, Economic Impact Studies of Agricultural Research and Extension (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Economic Growth Center, 1999 mimeo); and J. Alston and P. Pardey, International Approaches to Agricultural R&D: The CGIAR (Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1999, mimeo).

(6.) D. Byerlee and P. Moya, Impacts of International Wheat Breeding Research in the Developing World, 1966-90 (Mexico, DF: CIMMYT, 1993); and D. Byerlee and G. Traxler, "National and International Wheat Improvement Research in the Post Green Revolution Period: Evolution and Impacts," American Journal of Agricultural Economics 77 (May 1995): 268-78.

(7.) Anderson and Dalrymple, note 5 above.

(8.) G. Conway, The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the Twenty-First Century (London, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1997; Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1999); and G. Conway, "Food for All in the 21st Century," Environment, January/February 2000, 8-18.

(9.) R. Barker and D. Dawe, The Asian Rice Economy in Transition (Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Water Management Institute, 5 May 2000 (mimeo)).

(10.) For a review and rebuttal of the early criticisms, see Y. Hayami and V. W. Ruttan, Agricultural Development: An International Perspective (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 329-45. Michael Lipton, an early critic of the green revolution, has written that "If social scientists had in 1950 designed a blueprint for pro-poor agricultural innovation, they would have wanted something like the modern varieties: labor- intensive, risk reducing, and productive of cheaper, coarser varieties of food staples." M. Lipton and R. Longhurst New Seeds and Poor People (London, U.K.: Unwin Hyman. 1989), 400.

(11.) See, for example, R. Paarlberg, "The Global Food Fight; " Foreign Affairs 79 (May/June 2000): 24-38; and C. F. Runge and B. Senauer, 'A Removable Feast;' Foreign Affairs 79 (May/June 2000): 39-51.

(12.) J. Barton, "Patents and Antitrust: A Rethinking in Light of Patent Breadth and Sequential Innovation, "Antitrust Law Journal 65 (1997): 449-96; and J. Barton, "The Impact of Contemporary Patent Law on Biotechnology Research." in Global Genetic Resources: Access and Prospect Rights, S. Eberhart, ed. (Madison, Wisc.: Crop Science Society of America, 1998), 85-97.

(13.) This section draws on an earlier article, V. W. Ruttan, "The Transition to Agricultural Sustainability," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96 (May 1999): 5,960-67.

(14.) For the impact of population and income growth on food demand in India, see G. S. Bhalla, P. Hazel, and J. Kerr, Prospects for India's Cereal Supply and Demand to 2020 (Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1999).

(15.) P. L. Pingali, M. Hossain, and R. V. Gerpacio, Asian Rice Bowls: The Returning Crisis? Wallingford, Conn.: CAB International. 1997).

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